[cadandcookies]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

No need to jump down anyone's throat yet - it's just a thread asking for the pros / cons of why you make the decision you do. There's going to be some people implicitly asserting that a student coach means your team is more student run, or that a mentor coach is inherently better for on field performance, or other incorrect assumptions like that. I would encourage people to ignore them.

2791 has always used a mentor coach, and probably always will in regular season events. The opportunity for direct mentorship between the drive coach, strategy mentors, and students on the drive team is just too great to pass up. Much like a great football coach can inspire a football team, or a great basketball coach can keep players in the zone while making strategic decisions, a great robotics coach can serve as a role model, leader, and friend to a drive team. Watching the current drive team "grow up" under the direction of our mentor coach over the past two years has been incredible, and I'm sure not a single member of the drive team would trade away the dynamic that's developed for anything else.

A student coach is not a bad coach. We have worked with excellent student coaches over the past several years, and I was even a student coach on my old team. Along the same lines, a mentor coach is not inherently bad either. When doing pre-match strategy, I pay almost no attention to the age of the other coaches. I care about how knowledgeable they are of the game, their robot, and the strengths / weaknesses of the alliance. We work together to come up with a plan that lets everyone contribute in a positive way. If we come in with a plan and the other alliance is opposed to it, we try and find a compromise that works. I don't feel I have been listened to in pre-match strategy more as an adult than a student. Whether or not I'm listened to depends on my confidence, the validity of the plan, and my willingness to work with others.

A lot of the problems people have in this thread aren't with student coaches or mentor coaches. These people actually have problems with coaches who are massive jerks. Regardless of age, massive jerks shouldn't be coaches, and teams shouldn't let massive jerks serve as their coaches. If we all adhered to this rule, this topic wouldn't be nearly as contentious. I will say that coaches need to be some of the most mature people on the team, and it's easier to find a mature mentor than a mature student, but that doesn't mean students can't be mature enough for the role.

This sums up my team pretty well too. We've had an adult mentor as our drive coach for as long as I can remember, and a large part of that is the consistency and perspective that an adult can bring to the situation. For the last four (at least) years, our drive coach has been a data architect who has been with the team almost since the beginning. He's one of the calmest people I know and is a master of both persuasion and defusing tense situations, because that's his job. That being said, the last couple of years have let him take a back seat, letting students occasionally act as drive coaches for matches where there are other experienced drive teams on the field. Might we be a bit more successful if he was always out there? Probably, but I think we've found a happy medium. We're transitioning towards possibly having a different drive coach next year, who will probably also be an adult, but I think the same applies there-- students may come and go, but a good mentor drive coach can stay with the team and provide a solid cornerstone to work off of.